With that backdrop, the current state of SCRM and resiliency looks like this: We, at Lehigh and Villanova continue to teach the concepts along with several additional universities. More and more books are coming out covering SCRM and resiliency. All the major consultancies are writing about the concept on a regular basis, new standards are coming out of ISO and ASIS, there’s a new Certificate in SCRM from APICS and a very recent First-of-a-Kind Certification in Supply Chain Resiliency, “SC-R”, coming out of The Logistics Institute of Canada, which is Case-based, Team-based and Tool-based. In addition, about three to five new software solutions are coming online every six months, supporting certain pillars of supply-chain risk. The landscape also includes new metrics, such as Time-to-Recovery, Value at Risk, Risk Priority Numbering, Resiliency Indexes, Self-Assessment Maturity Models, online Country Risk & Resiliency Indexes and more.

What needs to be done by 2020
First and foremost, a Taxonomy — an agreement on terms and definitions. This is critical to gaining worldwide traction, thus reaching and moving beyond Roger’s “Tipping Point.” New software solutions will be needed to identify global risks expeditiously and new metrics and methodologies will be required to assess those risks. And finally, additional education forums will be needed, such as universities, credentialing organizations, new standards, more global workshops, adult executive education classes and enterprise-wide projects, including multiple departments to ensure new, rich and robust case studies demonstrating the ROI.

Where things are likely to be by 2020
With that target only three years away, we can hypothesize with a degree of confidence that global supply-chain risks will not be going away by 2020! We can then project that more universities will be teaching SCRM and resiliency as a critical success factor for global supply-chain excellence. We can count on more software solutions providing autonomic global risk alerts, digitizing those alerts and providing that risk identification to subscribers who have digitally mapped their supply chains and are superimposing those alerts across their own supply chains in an effort to Identify, Assess, Mitigate and Manage risks faster than their nearest competitors. Also, there will be more credentials for SC Risk and Resiliency from universities, credentialing organizations and standards-based organizations. One outstanding issue that will probably need more time is “The ROI” play. We suspect there will be more work to be done in this area and are confident consultancies, universities and exemplar companies will contribute to shoring up this issue, along with more Assessment Tools and perhaps SC Risk & Resiliency Simulation Games, as well.

The Outlook: Beyond 2020

SCRM software consolidation may begin, providing a more comprehensive SCRM and resiliency footprint for companies across multiple industries.  Combining the workflow and conversation between Finance and Supply Chain/Operations, using “The 3-E’s of Supply Chain Risk & Resiliency” (Education, Elevation and Evolution), will create a competitive advantage for companies beyond 2020.